Frances Bula

It sounds so familiar. Vancouver, desperate to create new housing, starts the planning process for a gigantic tract of empty land near water at the request of a developer. The first version is a forest of towers. Nearby residents, who largely...

The little shop at the corner of Victoria Drive and Grant Street had been a favourite stop of mine for years, a place to pick up an obscure spice or a poblano pepper without having to trek through the carnival...

Kim Maust had zero dreams of becoming a major player in the real estate world when she was a girl or even in her more grown-up 20s. Back then, she, in her words, “married a Mennonite boy and part of the...

In a city like Vancouver, touted with nauseating frequency as a Number One Place to Visit, Live, Invest, you’d think that every inch of space would be spoken for and maximized. It can feel like this must be true, as every...

The row of businesses along Carrall Street on the edge of Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood looks not that much different from the eclectic mix on other streets nearby. East Van Roasters, the coffee-roasting and chocolate shop. Nelson the Seagull, a bakery...

Jade Buchanan, a young Métis lawyer who moved to Vancouver from Regina five years ago to swim in a bigger, more exciting pool of the legal world, could probably have stretched to buy a home in the city as soon...

How important are hotels to a city’s economy? Crucial, I hear from the most unlikely suspects. They help reduce the need for short-term vacation rentals, some provide valuable community meeting spaces, and they’re essential to attract convention and non-convention visitors. How...

When I went to visit a friend in very suburban Tsawwassen recently for the first time in years, I felt bad for him as I parked in his building’s lot. Sigh, I thought. Another bland and boxy apartment that plonks...

Walk around Seattle’s South Lake Union these days, and it feels like it’s exploding with new life and development. The once-industrial zone is now a hodgepodge of shiny, futuristic office towers that house 21st-century businesses ranging from Amazon to biotech...

By winning the BC Liberal Party leadership, Kevin Falcon just made a high-profile return to politics after several years in property development. As the former MLA and cabinet minister gears up to take on the NDP in the next provincial election, we dug...

Linda and Patrick Power looked at downsizing from their Burnaby house a few years ago as they were approaching their 65-year marks. The four flights of stairs were just going to get harder to navigate. And taking care of the...

Michael Heeney has a theory about the future of this region as people continue to flood into the eastern suburbs. Downtown Vancouver will become less attractive to businesses run by that increasingly large proportion of suburban residents. It was a convenient...